Rishi Sunak’s decision to water down a key part of the UK’s green agenda represents a gamble that conceding some ground to the climate-skeptic political right will appeal to Britons buffeted by a cost-of-living crisis.
In a hastily arranged speech Wednesday after his planned U-turn was leaked to the BBC, the British prime minister said a ban on the sale of new fossil-fuel cars — a central plank of a legally-binding commitment to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 — would be pushed back five years to 2035.
“We’ve stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country, that no one seems to be happy with,” said Sunak, who campaigned for Brexit and served as former premier Boris Johnson’s chancellor. “If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people.” But according to political analysts, the Tories could be reading too much into their 495-vote win in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. The swing to Labour there would still erase the Tories’ majority if repeated nationwide in 2024.
“We are not going to save the planet by bankrupting British people,” Home Secretary Suella Braverman, a prominent figure on the right of the Tory Party, told Times Radio before Sunak’s speech. Former leader Liz Truss, whose disastrous premiership ended in record time last year but who still has a following in the party, also gave a speech calling for smaller government and for the net zero target to be pushed back.
Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister under both Johnson and Truss, was a rare voice on the Tory right who criticized Sunak, saying that he would “shatter” the political consensus and that voters in northern England, set to be the battleground in the next general election, support net zero because the policy delivers jobs in new industries.
“It is the opposite of good economics,” Nicholas Stern, chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said before the speech. “Kicking the can down the road will make the pathway to net zero more expensive, not less.”
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